Bitcoin Forum

The question is: What percentage of the market cap of fiat does BTC have to reach in order to be worth x dollars?

I didn't calculate it myself, I'm just throwing out numbers I have heard here and hopefully you guys can confirm/correct and go into specifics:

I have heard if BTC replaces all fiat money in the world, 1BTC would be worth approximately 1 million $ (I have also heard 2 million $, so maybe that 1 million is more on the lower side).

That would mean:

BTC Market Cap 0,1% of all fiat = 1 BTC  $1000
BTC Market Cap 1% of all fiat    = 1 BTC  $10 000
BTC Market Cap 10% of all fiat   = 1 BTC  $100 000
BTC Market Cap 100% of all fiat = 1 BTC  $1 000 000

I'll stop here...

Does anybody know how much the total M2 of fiat in the world is? And should we use exactly M2?

umm there is what 10Trillion dollars ? floating around the world that does not include all the other currencies

21million BTC in to 10 Trillion goes how many times ?

you need to do some homework 

The Gross World Product (GWP) is currently around 80 trillion US$. (That's a US trillion, a British billion.)

So, if today you managed to mine the entire 21 million BTC and replace all fiat currency with it, 1BTC would be roughly equal to 3,800,000 US$.

However, the GWP grows approx. 3% per year, making BTC worth way more by the time it's all mined should it replace fiat.

And, despite what we all wish, unless you had a hegemony that adopted BTC, you wouldn't replace all fiat. And, BTC being a pretty libertarian currency, I highly doubt most BTC proponents want a world government.

Why does it matter how much BTC will be worth in USD in the future? Why does it matter now? Unless you're a speculator, the whole idea is to abandon fiat. Once bitcoin replaces fiat, fiat will be worth 0 because nobody will use it, ideally.

Speculators  >:(

True, but it will matter how much buying power I have in a fiat-free future.

that's why µBTC exist ...  ;D

Thanks for that post - now that's something to work with!

Wouldn't the GWP be all the money the world economy turned over in a given period of time? How is that related to M2, M3 or whatever?

When you got some money on your account or under your mattress, it counts for the M's, but doesn't do anything, so doesn't count for the GWP.


Wow, that's a lot of $ for 1 BTC! Now, if you only took the BTCs currently in existence for that calculation, you would even get 6,500,000 US$ for 1 BTC!


Good point! Then, one could debate about the calculation of the GWP anyways, so it's all very complicated.

Furthermore, I don't believe the official GDP numbers for a second, they are "managed" intensely by the governments, especially the US one. Just calculating the US GDP with the real inflation would mean a negative growth for the US - which is exactly what is taking place! Europe is fucked as well.

In any case, we can see that all of those calculations are just a very rough number and you could calculate the variables in many different ways.


I totally agree. This is just to get a feeling for the current evaluation, and this seems to be even better than I thought...

BTC to $100,000 is good enough for me...!

21 mio goes into 10 trillion 476,000 times, and that number would be higher if we calculate with more than 10 trillion. So really, your post doesn't make any sense.

Better would be if you helped finding out with which number we should actually calculate (instead of 10 trillion).

I for one am a speculator, although I sincerely hope BTC will win against fiat via technical k.o.

Btw, speculators are necessary now, they speed up this process of adoption A LOT.

This whole calculation is just to get a refernce for where the BTC-price is right now, and I have to say, if you think about the possibilities, that calculation is more than amazing!

You're right. Monetary Base (MB) is probably the best bet to figure this out. MB of the US is supposedly $3,736,101,000,000. What about the world?

I'm probably going to embarrass myself here because it's been a few years and I don't have a good web connection to research. I think m3 is the figure you want. Even though it's still lies, it shows all of the money floating around the system including printed money. Bernanke stopped releasing the m3 figures because they weren't relevant (what a b.s. fuck that guy is). You'll probably find that every day around $3T passes hands through the world's financial systems and that is the figure that btc is chasing. GDP is a meaningless measure which includes things like unsold houses and cars plus all that government spending. So the government proudly claims GDP is rising when all that happened was they started a new war, or gave more money to bail out the welfare banks. Checkout shadowstats for some excellent estimates.

But even with that, I'm only finding statistics for the US. In order to answer the OP's original question, we need to know the value of the world's entire money supply.

ETA: Okay, I found an estimate of world M3 at $75 trillion, which, if it's at all accurate, makes my numbers not horrifically far off.

ETA:
http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth (http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth)

ETA:
But actually, I think M1 or M2 is a better measure for this than M3.
Using M1: If M1 =~ $2.5e13, then, at 100% BTC, 1BTC =~ $1.2 million
Using M2: If M2 =~ $6e13, then, at 100% BTC, 1BTC =~ $2.85 million

The first question is which one of the M's to take (M0, M1, M2, M3,M4).

I guess it should be either M2 or M3.

M0 and M1 would be too narrow, I'm pretty sure. So let's go with M3 (or maybe even M4), because this somewhat resembles the use of BTC and shows which part of the economy BTC could theoretically substitute.

I googled the world M3 for 20 minutes, I couldn't find it.

But $75 Trillion is what I remember having read somewhere as well - that is why initially I thought you were on the right track.

It's probably even higher than governments admit, with all the money printing (making 1BTC in our example worth more) - for example, the US government stopped reporting the M3 8 years ago.

Here's a clue. From today's headlines too.

'     The Fed, which supervises U.S. bank holding companies, is among authorities from London to Washington probing whether traders shared information that may have let them manipulate prices in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market to maximize their profits, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter, asking not to be named because it’s confidential. The central bank’s involvement in the probe hasn’t been previously reported.'

Rather than in $ terms, I think we need to look at it like this:

When/If BTC becomes 10,50,70,80, to 100% of all World currency, what is it's purchasing power?

I welcome the day that .000006 BTC pays a month's rent, or buys that new 50in LED tv you need.

 

I read you guys' reply after my post - I agree, M3 is what we want! World M3 should be a lot higher than 3 million though. GDP, as I initially suspected, is meaningless.

And yes, Shadowstats is awesome (I just got to it while doing my research - we probably researched simultaneously on the same pages, all of us... :) ).

I remember reading somewhere about $75 trillion, but I'm not sure and don't remember if it was M2, M3 or whatever.

We need M3 IMO, your quote is describing it in a bit of a strange way. BTC can for sure substitute long term deposits, and what are money market funds, something like a pension fund or so (this might just be a language problem, my mother tongue isn't English)? In that case, it would be better to calculate without those funds.

I'm pretty sure though M1 is not enough, that one is really too narrow. M2 or M3.

Using M3: If M3 =~ $75 trillions, then, at 100% BTC, 1BTC =~ $3.57 million

EDIT: I guess something between M2 and M3 would be accurate (depending on what institutional money market funds exactly are and how much of M3 they actually make up..)

But that's just a different way of calculating it, right?

We are just doing our calculations in terms of todays purchasing power.

The 21mio. bitcoins are the monetary base. It is "physical".
1. When I have 1Mio. btc and deposit it on a bank, M1 grew by 1mio. to 22mio., because I have 1mio. which I can withdraw all the time and the bank has 1mio. in theier physical power.
2. When I lend 1mio. btc to you and we make a contract that you pay me back 1mio. in one year, M1 stays the same, but M2 grew by 1mio.

So does it make sense to take the M0 number, the monetary base? Not really, because Bitcoin is not a money like we knew it. Maybe we need no banks in the future. Less lending, because no manipulating of the money supply. etc.

But this is all just hypothtical. I think it is possible to go to 100 000$ in terms of purchasing power of 1$ today. But that's it. And this number we reach only if everything works perfekt. Not only the state is a thread. Google etc. could come up with a better money. As so can do other cryptocurrencies.

I have estimated that if BTC hits 1 million dollars in the next 3 years, mining will be so profitable that miners can spend up to 3.6$ billion every day in electricity.  So there will be billions of dollars worth of Bitcoins hitting the exchanges every day. 

Exchanges? What exchanges? With being so expensive who would pay your super market, Amazon.com, your employees, your dentist, your mother with Bitcoin and only would receive Bitcoin. What exchanges?

More interessting would be, how much electricity would get wasted and how many hardware. Bitcoin would be much more secure than it would be necessary...

I doubt anyone would be able to accurately predict this.

But there is always the same number of BTCs coming into existance every day, no matter what they are worth, right? So I don't see how spending more on mining brings more BTCs into existance.

Yea true, actually it becomes smaller when block rewards half.
But as bitcoin value is 1 million, the bitcoins going into the market are maybe worthmore then now.

Ok, I see. That's obvious though, and they will do much less to the market than they would do now.

You got a point there.  But, until you can pay your utility bills in Bitcoins, mining costs will push the price of Bitcoin down.

"Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoins" in this case does not mean more bitcoins.  If one Bitcoin is selling for 1 million, then daily 3600 Bitcoins becomes $3.6 billion. 

Worldwide money (which is debt) is 200 Trillion.

Bitcoin will never replace fiat.   Fiat will always be used for a large number of transaction, Bitcoin and other cryptos can strive to be the best alternative, but there is no way for a virtual currency to replace a physical currency, when not everyone on the planet has an internet connection.

With "money" defined as what (M2, M3,...)?

Source?